Sci-fi award goes to cyberpunk Zoo City

On Wednesday evening, South African writer Lauren Beukes was awarded the UK's 25th Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel for her second book, Zoo City. Beukes arrived on the sci-fi landscape with a resounding crash when her debut novel, Moxyland, was first published in the UK in 2009. Its warts-and-all take on a near-future Cape Town updated the ageing tropes of cyberpunk for a globalised world. Now, with Zoo City, Beukes throws a sort of urbanised magic realism into the mix, portraying the tenements of Johannesburg as "zoos" populated by criminal outcasts whose guilt manifests as symbiotic animal companions.

It's something of a tradition with the Clarke award that the odds-on favourite tends to be a bad bet; while praise for Zoo City has been unstinting, many commentators and fans, myself included, expected the prize - an ornamental bookend, and a cheque for the same number of pounds sterling as the year in which the award occurs - to go to Ian McDonald's The Dervish House, a near-future tale of nanotech, politics, antiquities hunting and energy-market megascams set in the frantic urban churn of Istanbul. McDonald was gracious in defeat, which may have been made easier by The Dervish House snaring the British Science Fiction Association's annual award for best novel-length work last weekend. (The book's nomination for a Hugo - the annual prizes awarded by the World Science Fiction Convention - can't have hurt, either.)

The Clarke wouldn't be the Clarke without some controversy over the final shortlist, however. The award is open to any science fiction novel with a UK publication date that falls within the year preceding the ceremony, and is rare in that, like the Man Booker Prize, it is a juried award. This year the judging panel had to whittle down a field of 54 submissions to a shortlist of six, which, alongside Zoo City and The Dervish House, included Monsters Of Men by Patrick Ness, Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan (who took the 1999 prize for her novel Dreaming In Smoke), Generosity by Richard Powers and Declare by Tim Powers.

Declare had the dubious honour of being this year's eligibility discussion point; its status as a "secret history" rather than a "pure" science fiction novel - surely one of the most persistent oxymorons in the genre - raised fewer eyebrows than the fact that its original publication in the US took place almost a decade ago. Such controversies fuel the largely good-natured annual arguments of the genre's fan community - you might say that the Clarke award is our equivalent of British soccer's F.A. Cup, with all the same potential for long-odds outsiders to upset the apple cart.

New challenges await the Clarke award in years to come. As publishing passes through the same needle's eye of digital distribution that's winnowing the record industry, the eligibility criteria as they stand will present a real logistical nightmare for the committee: should self-published books be eligible? Titles that have been published only in electronic formats? These questions remain to be answered... but sci-fi aficionados hope that the award will continue to be as prestigious and contentious as ever, and a calendar highlight for fans of imaginative literature the world over.